Talk.Terms

Statement it does not imply that the characters not to be used in Creole should not be used in Creole isn't very clear...
I guess it should read it does not imply that the characters not in Creole should not be used in Creole.

I suggest to just join both lists, keeping track of which characters are in Creole seems a little pointless. It seems it could be maybe potentially useful when looking for conflicts, but that's not true -- since most of Creole's markup is 2 or more characters anyways.

In English square brackets have a legitimate and common use when abbreviating quotes. They are also used in diplomatic text which is the closest thing to wiki that ever existed prior to the 90s. Single square brackets must be left alone for these purposes, though double and triple of course do mean something.

It would be nice if the various types of brackets had a legitimate orthogonal rationale. For instance, square brackets could always be involved in linking, while curly braces could always be involved in deciding how text within them was to be displayed or interpreted, and parentheses could always call for processing or macros of some kind to be invoked. That would allow for useful extensions or combinations of conventions from various wikis. For instance, supporting the tikiwiki ((double parenthesis)) to specifically mean a user-specific or group-specific version of a page, since tikiwiki uses gACL access control and unlike most wikis there is usually quite a bit of information about the end user. Allowing the regular [[internal link]] notation to coexist as a generic, all-purpose, all-users-can-see this baseline version of the same thing.
-- Anonymous, 2007-02-05

The single square brackets (as well as single curly braces and single parenthesis) are left out of Creole due to their frequent appearance in normal text.

Thank you for your suggestions on the consistent meaning of the characters. unfortuanatelly, Creole is not created in vacuum, and we are consider the compatibility with existing wiki markups an important goal. Also, most of Creole's markup is already pretty much decided.

Incidentally, it's already pretty much how you describe it. Square brackets are for all kinds of links, curly braces are for all kinds of inserted objects (be it nowiki, code or images), angle brackets are for macros and plugins, finally parenthesis are not used so far.

By the way, I took the freedom of removing the link to non-existing page "square brackets" from your text, as to avoid shallow pages.
-- RadomirDopieralski, 2007-02-05

Of course it's "already pretty much how I describe it" because that way is right. ;-) It's not a problem, as long as parenthesis isn't in use, to extend Creole slightly to fuse with tikiwiki in the way I suggested above.

However, looking at the recent changes, it's only been a few days since the "reasoning" was made visible to the whole world in proper wiki form. So if "Creole's markup is already pretty much decided" including the bold/italic mess, so quickly after its initial proposal is made available for comment, then I hold out no hope of its universal adoption. Of all conventions those are clearly the most wrong, and least compatible with the way most wiki data is now. They need to be fixed.

Every punctuation mark deserves its own page but of course the link should be to the singular square bracket. It's not shallow to describe all the uses of a square bracket in legitimate English usage, because this will help to convince a person convinced that [this is a link] that it absolutely cannot be one. If you are really worried about that, make [[diplomatic text]] a redirect to the [[square bracket]] page and explain it all at once. Keeping separate redirects, I hope you know, is the best way to differentiate reasons to link to one page...
-- Anonymous, 2007-02-05

You can summarise the English typography patterns on a single page easily. It's really not that much text if written well. It's usually only about 1/10 of most style guides. Other people can include similar pages for other languages too. World is a little bigger than just Canada, after all.

All the discussion is open and publicly available since the very beginning, I've left you some links on Talk.RadomirDopieralski. The *Reasoning pages are just summaries of the most relevants points of these discussions, for those who are not interested in working on Creole, but would like to know. I guess they should include links to the actual discussions too.